Alexander Hamilton welcomed the year 1804 at his country estate,
The Grange, seven miles north of New York City, on the two-hundred-foot-high
ridge known as Harlem Heights. Not long after he
arose, a bone-chilling rain began sluicing out of a gray sky. The two-story
house, with its high porches and four rectangular chimneys (two of them
fakes, added for symmetry), had been designed by John McComb, creator
of New York's City Hall and other distinguished buildings. From the
front porch, which faced south, there was a magnificent view of New York
City, its immense harbor, and the mighty Atlantic beyond Sandy Hook.
Through the floor-to-ceiling bay windows of the elegant octagonal dining
room there was an equally compelling view of the Harlem River valley,
turbulent Hell Gate, and the swift-flowing East River. From similar
windows on the other side of the parlor, Hamilton surveyed the broad
Hudson River and its majestic western bluffs, the Palisades. Beyond
stretched the vast American continent, peopled by a scant four million
Americans and perhaps a million Indians.

These imperial views were not very entrancing on a rainy New Year's
Day, of course. In fact, the stripped trees and the brown fields gave The
Grange a forlorn, abandoned look. Someone with prophetic tendencies
might have seen this gloom as a portent, but it is unlikely that Hamilton
viewed it as anything more than a rainy winter morning. He did not know
it was the last New Year's Day he would see.

Inside the house, which Hamilton had named after the ancestral estate
of his Scottish grandfather, servants and perhaps Hamilton himself were
soon busy keeping the numerous fireplaces blazing. Although The
Grange's clapboard walls were lined with brick, the lofty site made it a
target for icy winds. With seven children in the house, ranging in age
from two to nineteen, it was impossible to warm only a few rooms. Since
firewood was extremely expensive on Manhattan Island in 1804, each
winter day Hamilton spent in The Grange literally burned a hole in his
pocket.

The house and the surrounding thirty-two acres had cost him $22,220
(the equivalent in modern dollars of perhaps $300,000) and much of this
remained borrowed money. Furnishing The Grange and living in the
style that such a fine mansion required, with servants, a cook, and a gardener,
were also expensive burdens for a man who depended entirely on
the cash he earned as a lawyer. One of the many ironies about Alexander
Hamilton was the parlous state of his personal finances. The man who
had resuscitated the expiring economy of the new nation frequently ran
short of funds.

Hamilton averaged about $11,000 a year ($150,000 modern dollars) as
one of the leading attorneys of the New York Bar. But his expenses constantly
outran his income. When The Grange was nearing completion in
1802, he wrote to one client that it "would be amazingly convenient to me
to touch your money as soon as possible." Intermittently, Hamilton
vowed to economize; at one point he considered leasing The Grange and
reducing his expenses to $4,000 a year. But the house was linked too intimately
with Hamilton's image of himself as a man of consequence. To
abandon it would have been a psychic amputation he could never endure.

In 1804 everyone called Alexander Hamilton "General." He was even
accorded the title in the New York City directory. A lieutenant colonel in
the American Revolution, Hamilton had achieved this new rank in
America's first undeclared war, the nasty brawl with revolutionary France
that lasted from 1798 to 1800. All the shooting had been done at sea;
General Hamilton's army never fought a battle. But he was extremely
proud of achieving this rank and virtually insisted on preserving it as a
civilian.

This fondness for a title, military or otherwise, was not unusual. Foreign
visitors noted that Americans of the early 1800s, while claiming to
despise aristocracy and its artificial distinctions, constantly addressed one
another as "Colonel," "Major," "Judge" long after the terms had an immediate
application. The national passion for equality, another trait visitors
noticed, apparently had its limits. But Hamilton's fondness for "General"
meant far more than a mild desire for distinction among his peers. Like
The Grange, the title had deep links with his innermost psychology.

Red-haired, large-headed, with deep blue, almost violet eyes and ruddy
cheeks, Hamilton was short by modern standardsabout five feet
sevenbut this was an average height in his era, when growth was sapped
by numerous childhood diseases for which there were no vaccines.
Hamilton's slim, sinewy frame, his vigorous manner, his erect carriage inevitably
drew the adjectives "soldierly" and "martial" from many men who
commented on his appearance. Some admirers called him "the little
lion"a tribute to his pugnacity.

When Hamilton was building The Grange, he often came up from the
city on weekends and lived with his three older sons in tents on the property.
"He measured the distances as though marking the frontage of a
(military) camp," his son John Church Hamilton later recalled. "When he
walked along, his step seemed to fall naturally into the cadenced pace of
practiced drill." John Church never forgot the way his father read the
commentaries of Julius Caesar, translating the Latin as he went along:
"With what emphasis and fervor did he read of battles ... it would seem
as though Caesar were present; for as much as any man that ever lived, he
had the soldier's temperament."

When he relaxed with his sons, Hamilton's favorite topic was stories
from the American Revolution. The location of The Grange undoubtedly
intensified these recollections. It was on Harlem Heights that nineteen-year-old
Captain Alexander Hamilton first won the attention of the
American army's high command. His artillery company was one of the
few units in the ragtag assemblage of Continental regulars and state militia
that retained its discipline and esprit de corps in the dolorous fall of
1776, when the Americans lost battle after battle to a resurgent British
army. Early in the following year, Captain Hamilton was promoted to
lieutenant colonel and became one of George Washington's aides, beginning
his ascent to power and renown.

II

Later in the morning of New Year's Day, General Hamilton gathered his
wife and seven children around him and read something very different
from Caesar's commentariesthe Episcopal Church service. In his teens
Hamilton had been intensely religious. Robert Troup, his roommate at
New York's Kings College (which had changed its name to Columbia after
the War for Independence), recalled that he had knelt to say his
prayers every night and morning. A Presbyterian minister had been responsible
for rescuing the illegitimate son of bankrupt James Hamilton
and tempestuous Rachel Faucett Lavien from the West Indian backwater
of St. Croix and sending him to America for an education. But Hamilton's
adolescent piety had soon faded into the stoic creed that the leaders
of the Revolution preferred to the complex theology of Christianity, with
its belief in a crucified God and redemption through suffering.

Sometimes called Deism, the faith of the founding fathers replaced a
personal God with an opaque Providence, whom George Washington
once referred to as "it." Although the father of the country attended the
Episcopal Church, Washington usually left before the communion service,
pointedly if silently stating his disbelief in this central ceremony of
the Christian faith. When Thomas Jefferson inveighed against "every
form of tyranny over the mind of man," he was talking about organized
Christianity. During the Constitutional Convention, when the delegates
seemed deadlocked, Benjamin Franklin had suggested starting the day
with a prayer to seek the help of divine wisdom. Hamilton had risen to
oppose the idea, claiming it would be a confession of political disunity.
He blithely added that he saw no need to seek "foreign aid."

Deism had apparently seemed sufficient to the mature Hamilton, especially
in the 1790s, when he had been President George Washington's secretary
of the treasury, the young nation's most influential politician. Hamilton
had taken a country floundering in a morass of $80 million in state and federal
war debts (40 percent of the gross national product) and in a series of
brilliant state papers, persuaded Congress to transform this demoralizing
legacy of the Revolution into a national asset. Following England's example,
Hamilton saw the debt could become "a blessing" if it was converted into
liquid capital bonds backed by the full credit of the new federal government,
which had the power to raise money by taxes and tariffs. To stabilize the
new system and prime the national financial pump, Hamilton persuaded
Congress to create the semipublic Bank of the United States. In five years,
the United States had the highest credit rating in the world and a reliable
money supply was fueling prosperity from Boston to Savannah.

In those heady days, Alexander Hamilton believed human intelligence
was enough to shape a man's and a nation's destiny. But bitter personal
and political experiences had altered this opinion. In recent years, intelligence
seemed a frail safeguard against the onrush and inrush of passion,
both personal and political. His view of mankind, never optimistic, had
veered toward a belief in human depravity that could best be explained by
another basic Christian concept, original sin.

General Hamilton read the Episcopal service with the sonorous sincerity
of a man who genuinely wanted to inculcate religion in his seven children.
Although he was something of an absentee father because of the
demands of politics and the legal profession, Hamilton did his best to
provide them with the happy family life he had seldom experienced as a
boy in the West Indies. His dark-haired, attractive mother had never
bothered to legitimize her common-law marriage to his financially inept
father, James Hamilton, and she finally kicked him out of her bed to send
him wandering through the islands like a pathetic, possibly alcoholic castaway.
Before Hamilton was born, the headstrong Rachel had ended a legal
marriage to John Michael Lavien (or Levine) by sleeping with other
men so blatantly that her outraged husband had her jailed for "whoring
with everyone." Although Hamilton sometimes mentioned "our dear father"
in letters to his brother, James, there is no record of him ever having
spoken or written affectionately of his mother.

How seriously Hamilton regarded the sacred words of the Sunday service
as food for his own soul is debatable. On January 11, 1804, he would
be forty-seven, a fairly old age in an era when only a few people lived into
their sixties and seventies. It would not be implausible to find him thinking
about death and considering a return to the faith of his youth. Moreover,
General Hamilton had experienced several varieties of suffering in
the previous three years.

From the summit of political power on which he had stood in 1800, as
the leader of the triumphant Federalist Party, he had been pitched into
the pit of impotence when Thomas Jefferson won the presidency and
Aaron Burr the vice presidency on the Republican ticket in November of
that fateful year. In 1801 Hamilton's political humiliation was completed
when he failed to elect his sister-in-law's husband, wealthy Stephen Van
Rensselaer, governor of New York in a savage struggle with the state
leader of the Republicans, a man the General detested, George Clinton.

In that contest, General Hamilton's political enemies had showered him
with abuse. Robert Troup reported that at one polling place, Hamilton was
"repeatedly called a thief; and at another ... called a rascal, villain, and every
thing else that is in famous [sic] in society." For a man who saw himself as a
patriot who had spent the previous fifteen years struggling selflessly for the
good of his country, these insults were especially bitter.

In the circle of trusting faces around Hamilton there was evidence of
another blow. His beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter Angelica listened
to the stately prose of the Episcopal service with blank uncomprehending
eyes. For the past two and one-half years, Angelica, who used to delight
her father with her skill on the harp and pianoforte, had been insane. Her
mental breakdown had been triggered by a tragedy that had almost driven
General Hamilton and his wife, Elizabeth, berserk.

III

On November 20, 1801, the Hamiltons' handsome oldest son, nineteen-year-old
Philip, recently graduated from Columbia College, had gotten
into a quarrel with one of President Thomas Jefferson's supporters, a
twenty-seven-year-old lawyer named George I. Eacker. Philip and his
friend Richard Price had invaded Eacker's box at the Park Theater and
taunted him about a speech he had made on July 4, 1801. Eacker had
hailed President Thomas Jefferson as the rescuer of the Constitution and
implied that General Hamilton was not averse to seizing power with a
coup d'etat. Philip's hooliganish conduct suggests he and his friend Price
were drunk. Realistic Robert Troup, belying his fond parents' view of
Philip's talents and promise, described him as a "sad rake."

The infuriated Eacker called both young men "damned rascals"an
expression of contempt that left them with only one response, if they
hoped to retain their standing in the masculine world of the time. They
promptly challenged him to a duel.

This ritualized conflict was based on the assumption that a gentleman
had to be prepared to defend his honor at all times. Inherited from the
days of chivalry, in the sixteenth century dueling became popular among
European aristocrats, army and naval officers, and politicians. It took root
in America during the Revolution, when the officer corps of the Continental
army strove to establish their status as gentlemen.

During the 1790s, the American duel became a way to intimidate or
humiliate a political opponentand demonstrate a man's readiness to
verify the sincerity of his opinions by risking his life. Frequently condemned
by churchmen and banned by legislatures, it persisted because it
was a way of acting out the fratricidal passions that the politics of the
1790s had evoked. Also, it was a chance for a man to display his courage
without extreme risk, unless his opponent was a crack shot. In one study
of dueling, fatalities were less than 20 percent. Another study found only
one duelist in fourteen died. Most duelists escaped unscathed, or with
minor wounds, at worst. It had become fashionable among some writers
to portray these affairs as more farcical than fatal.

Eacker and Richard Price met first. Because dueling was illegal in New
York, they journeyed to Weehawken, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson
River. The encounter seemed to confirm the impression that amateur
duelists were not a serious threat to life or limb. Four shots were exchanged
without a hit.

A Hamilton friend urged Philip to apologize to Eacker for his bad
manners at the theater. That minimal courtesy might have persuaded
Eacker to retract the insult, "rascal." Perhaps emboldened by Price's description
of Eacker's poor aim, Philip declined, and insisted on an immediate
"interview," as these affairs of honor were called.

General Hamilton, learning about the duel, advised Philip to fire his
pistol into the air. Whether this advice was based on religious or tactical
grounds is unclear. "Throwing away" one's fireknown as a delope by
those who preferred French dueling terminologywas an accepted way
of aborting a duel. The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first,
giving no hint of what he was planning to do. If the other man insisted on
another shot, he could be accused of bloodthirsty, even murderous intentionsa
slur no gentleman wanted to incur. Often the duelists' seconds
would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot.

Hamilton may have been reluctant to see Philip wound or kill Eacker
over a quarrel the young man had starteda motive that might have involved
religious feelings, or simple common sense. Firing in the air was
also a way to express a certain contempt for one's opponent, or a moral superiority.
William Pitt, until recently prime minister of England, had
chosen the delope when taunted into a duel by a parliamentary critic.

Eacker and Philip Hamilton met on November 23, 1801. For a full
minute, neither fired at the word "present." Eacker probably did not want
to hurt Philip for a variety of reasons: the difference in their ages, the triviality
of the quarrel, his father's influence and prestige. If Philip had offered
an apology at this point, the dispute still could have been settled
with a handshake.

Instead, Philip leveled his pistol. Perhaps the young man simply
wanted to share bragging rights with his friend Price about hearing a bullet
whistle. Or like most nineteen-year-olds, he considered himself indestructible.
Eacker leveled and fired. His bullet struck Philip just above the
hip, ripped through his body, and lodged in his arm. Philip's return shot
went wild.

The young man died in agony twenty-four hours later, with his tormented
mother and father beside him on the bed, frantically clutching
him in their arms. At the funeral, General Hamilton almost collapsed.
"Never did I see a man so completely overwhelmed with grief," wrote
Robert Troup. Not long after the funeral, Angelica Hamilton drifted into
a miasma of confusion and fear from which she never emerged for the rest
of her long life. Over and over again she played on her piano and harp the
songs of 1800-01 that had pleased her fatherand presumably
Philipso much.

IV

Those who have wanted to believe Alexander Hamilton experienced a
profound change of heart as a result of these political disappointments
and personal tragedies have combed his letters to find evidence of such a
transformation. They have portrayed The Grange as a place where "his
religious feelings grew with his growing intimacy with the marvellous
works of nature. But General Hamilton planned The Grange in 1798,
when he was at the height of his political power. What he wanted was a
country estate similar to those owned by other notable New Yorkers, such
as Vice President Aaron Burr's elegant Richmond Hill, on the Hudson
below present-day Fourteenth Street. Only in such a house could the
General receive important visitors in a style that befitted a man who saw
himself as the arbiter of the destiny of North America.

As for his growing intimacy with the works of nature, the General was
a disaster as a farmer. Several times, he remarked wryly in letters that a
garden was a "usual refuge of a disappointed politician." But he added late
in 1802 that he was "as little fitted" to be a farmer "as Jefferson to guide
the helm of the United States. When he was planning The Grange,
there was some heady talk of profits from the farm produce that could be
raised on thirty-two acres. But that was just Hamilton's way of convincing
himself that he could afford the house. In December of 1802, as they were
moving in, Hamilton confided to a friend that "the greatest part of my little
farm will be dedicated to grass." Whereupon he solicited advice on
how to grow that plant successfully. Since they moved in, the Hamiltons'
total profits from The Grange were $18.00 from the sale of some garden
strawberries, cabbages, and asparagus.

Further reason to doubt General Hamilton's conversion from politics to
religion and domesticity was a letter to James A. Bayard, the influential
Federalist congressman from Delaware, written not long after Philip
Hamilton's death. The General proposed the creation of a "Christian
Constitutional Society," which would be organized into local clubs, state
councils, and a national council, consisting of a president and twelve
members. Its purpose would be the defense of the Christian religion and
the Constitution against the assaults of the Republicans, led by their purportedly
atheistic leader, President Thomas Jefferson.

Hamilton told Bayard he feared the Federalist party was doomed unless
it could "contrive to take hold of & carry along with us some strong feelings
of the mind." In fact, he had begun to doubt whether it was possible
for them to succeed "without in some degree employing the weapons
which have been employed against us." By this he meant newspapers like
Philadelphia's Aurora and New York's American Citizen, crammed with
the sort of billingsgate the Republicans had used to demonize General
Hamilton and the Federalists. At the same time Hamilton admitted he
shuddered at "corrupting public opinion" until it became "fit for nothing
but mischief."

The Christian Constitutional Society was his answer to this dilemma.
Bayard rejected the idea, commenting that the notion was better suited to
the Republicans. "We have the greater number of political Calculators
and they of political fanaticks," he wrote.

Manipulating religion for public purposes was not a new idea for General
Hamilton. Ever since the French Revolution revealed its hatred of
Christianity in the early 1790s, Hamilton had used piety to summon the
Federalist faithful to the hustings. When he was preparing the country
for war with France in 1797, he urged Congress to mobilize "the religious
ideas of America." In 1798, excoriating Thomas Jefferson and other admirers
of France, he accused them of "a conspiracy to establish atheism on
the ruins of Christianity." But for all his private and public displays of
devotion to Christianity, General Hamilton had yet to join a church.

The reason for this hesitation was probably political. Hamilton was
strongly attracted to the Episcopal church. But Episcopalians were not in
good repute among most voters in New York, because so many of them
had been loyalists during the Revolution. As members of the Church of
England, they had tended to support their titular head, His Majesty,
George III. Although the Episcopalians had redefined themselves as an
American church and pledged their allegiance to the new nation, in the
overheated politics of 1804, Hamilton's enemies were not above suggesting
that joining them was further proof of his treasonous pro-British
leanings.

Instead of scrutinizing General Hamilton's words and actions to indict
him for religious hypocrisy or exonerate him as a genuine Christian, it
might be wiser to regard him as a man in the middle of a spiritual journey,
carrying with him all the baggage he had acquired from the previous
forty-seven years of a crowded and tumultuous life. The ideas and ideals
of Christianity had recently begun mingling with other core beliefs. But a
man who toiled on dozens of complex cases in maritime and commercial
law and simultaneously attempted to keep abreast of national and international
politics did not have the time or the inclination to sort out the
contradictions and inconsistencies.

V

There is some evidence that General Hamilton took more interest in his
wife and family after his fall from power. "It will be more and more my
endeavor to abstract myself from all pursuits which interfere with those of
affection," he wrote. But this statement was only a promise of future
performance, about as convincing as his resolutions to economize. To
Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, pregnant with their last child, the General
wrote in 1801: "Indeed my Eliza, you are very essential to me. Your
virtues more and more endear you to me and experience more and more
convinces me that true happiness is only to be found in the bosom of
one's own family."

This is a curious statement for a husband to make to a wife of twenty
years. It suggests that only recently had Hamilton found Eliza endearing.
Heretofore had he sought happiness in other bosoms? Or was there some
other transformative experience that had captured the general's soul? The
answer to both questions would seem to be: yes.

The words, and the realities behind them, explain the uncertainty that
mars Elizabeth Hamilton's mouth in her 1787 portrait by Ralph Earl, the
only likeness painted during her husband's lifetime. The mouth contributes
to an overall impression of timidity, insecurity, even melancholy.
She is a fairly attractive woman, with deep-set dark eyes beneath thick
brows. But there is not an iota of the fire, the dash, the self-confidence
that emanates from almost every portrait of her dynamic husband.

To be fair, Hamilton was not entirely to blame for inflicting these feelings
of inadequacy on Elizabeth Hamilton. She grew up the daughter of
Hudson River lord Philip Schuyler, owner of vast upstate acreage, a major
general in the Revolution, confidante of Washington. Schuyler's overbearing
parental style goaded Elizabeth's four sisters into selecting husbands
of whom their father disapprovedand three of them eloped. Only
Elizabeth remained docile, choosing a man whose closeness to Washington
guaranteed General Schuyler's blessing.

Another person who may have sown uncertainty in Elizabeth Hamilton's
soul was her attractive oldest sister, Angelica. Witty, intelligent, rambunctious,
in 1777 she eloped with John Barker Church, a wealthy
Englishman who had fled to America under an assumed name, probably
to escape jail for his gambling debts. Church eventually persuaded General
Schuyler to help him obtain the post of commissary to the French
army that came to America in 1780. The Englishman made a fortune,
which he multiplied with shrewd investments in England and America.
He spent it freely to give Angelica every imaginable luxury and let her
roam high society in London, Paris, and New York as a flirtatious woman
of fashion, while he concentrated on the one thing that seemed to interest
himmaking more money in business and at gaming tables.

Betsy Hamilton seems to have worshiped Angelica almost as much as
she adored her brilliant husband. But in 1804, many New Yorkers, including
that constant Hamilton watcher, Robert Troup, suspected that Angelica
and General Hamilton had resumed a torrid affair, suspended, with exquisite
regret on both sides, in 1789, when she returned to England after a
lengthy visit to New York without her husband. If Elizabeth Hamilton suspected
anything about the General and Angelica, she suffered in silence. In
their tormented letters to each other, the lovers constantly made it a point
to include Betsy in their protestations of undying affection.

It need hardly be added that this affair, for which circumstantial evidence
is strong but absolute confirmation is elusive, did not exactly jibe
with General Hamilton's newly discovered Christian inclinations. It is
one more piece of evidence that the General's life had become very
complicatedperhaps
too complicated for him to comprehend.

VI

Compounding Elizabeth Hamilton's wifely melancholy in the years after
Ralph Earl painted her portrait was Maria Reynolds, a dark-haired passionate
woman-about-Philadelphia, with whom Hamilton became involved
in 1791, when the Quaker City was the national capital. Although
he was riding high as secretary of the treasury with President George
Washington's firm backing for his determination to transform a mostly
rural America into a financial and industrial powerhouse, Hamilton had
recently experienced his first political defeat.

His father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler, had been serving as one of
New York's senators in the new federal government. Hamilton had engineered
his election by the state's legislature in 1789, cavalierly ignoring
the expectations of the powerful Livingston family, who owned at least as
much acreage in the Hudson River valley as Schuyler. In 1788, the eloquent
leader of that family, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, had warmly
supported Hamilton in the ferocious struggle to persuade New Yorkers to
ratify the Constitution in spite of Governor George Clinton's stubborn
opposition. Underscoring his arrogance, Hamilton had vetoed the election
of a Livingston in-law, New York Mayor James Duane, for the state's
second senate seat and insisted on choosing Massachusetts-born Rufus
King, who had only recently become a New York resident. This moment
of hubris led to a Livingston alliance with Governor Clinton, with repercussions
that still afflicted Hamilton.

When General Schuyler's name was placed in nomination for a second
term in the U.S. Senate, the new allies flexed their political muscles. Another
nominee came from nowhere to displace Schuyler: Aaron Burr. A
fellow lawyer and veteran of the Revolution, Burr too had been a Hamilton
ally against George Clinton for a while. But the short, affable New
Jersey native had grown disillusioned with Hamilton's domineering leadership.
Burr had been particularly irked by the way Hamilton had
crammed Rufus King down New Yorkers' throats because the secretary of
the treasury wanted to have this devoted follower in the U.S. Senate to
support his financial program.

Hamilton's failure to deliver a coveted post for his father-in-law may
have complicated his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyleror his affair with
Angelica Schuyler Church. The latter seems more likely. It is hard to
imagine Betsy rebuking Hamilton for a political lapse. Angelica, on the
other hand, savored mixing power and passion. Hamilton frequently
wrote to her about his political travails and triumphs, and she seems to
have been extremely disappointed by her father's humiliation. A rebuke
from her could well have made Hamilton susceptible to Maria Reynolds,
another woman of fashion who had no association with his defeat and
who appealed to him as a man of power, capable of rescuing her from the
grip of an abusive, unfaithful husband.

In no time Maria Reynold's husband, James, appeared, ready and eager
to play the pimp, if Hamilton came through with enough cash. The bewitched
Hamilton paid him over $1,000 for continuing access to Maria.
Soon Reynolds was going around Philadelphia claiming that the secretary
of the treasury was giving him inside tips to speculate in government
securities. Accused of corruption by a delegation of congressmen led by
Thomas Jefferson's close friend, Senator James Monroe of Virginia,
Hamilton gave them copies of his love letters from Maria to prove his financial,
if not his marital, integrity.

Five years later, in 1797, the letters surfaced in a pamphlet by a muckraking
Scottish-born newspaperman, James Thomson Callender. The Scotsman
accused Hamilton of faking the affair to cover up immense
speculations based on his insider's knowledge of U.S. Treasury policies, enabling
him and his friends to pocket millions of dollars. Hamilton responded
by confessing the affair in a pamphlet that reaffirmed his financial
integrityand left the nation gasping with disbelief at his sexual candor.

In this confession, Hamilton displayed an almost breathtaking ability
to see himself as blameless, even though he was admitting something that
would make most men squirm. He claimed the entire scandal was a
"conspiracy of vice against virtue"the vice being all on the side of his
political enemiesand even asserted he should be flattered to be the object
of persecution by such a despicable faction. Seldom if ever, he declaimed,
had any man been pursued with such rancor and venom for so
little cause. Yet he was buoyed by his "proud consciousness of innocence"
because he had not sullied his financial integrity, no matter how often he
had sullied Maria Reynolds.

Entwined as the statement was with politics, only a few biographers
have noted that it included a passage in which Hamilton revealed an anguished,
profoundly personal regret for his infidelity: "This confession is
not made without a blush ... I can never cease to condemn myself for the
pang which it may inflict in a bosom eminently entitled to all my gratitude,
fidelity, and love." Unquestionably he was referring to Elizabeth
Hamilton here.

Back in 1780, when Hamilton proposed to Betsy, his fellow aides on
George Washington's staff called her "the little saint" and expressed amazement
that Hamilton would select someone so devout for his wife. At army
headquarters, Martha Washington, in one of her droller moments, had
nicknamed the house pet, a bigheaded, extremely amorous tomcat, "Hamilton"a
glimpse of his reputation as a ladies man in those days.

Marrying Betsy did not turn Hamilton into a saint. In the heyday of his
power, rumors swirled that he was constantly on the prowl for attractive
women. One Federalist congressman from New England wrote home indignantly,
telling a friend that he resented the way the secretary of the
treasury, at a recent dinner in Philadelphia, had spent the evening casting
"liquorish looks at my cara sposa."

Betsy's sisters seemed to have had no illusions about their brother-in-law.
At another Philadelphia dinner party, Angelica Church lost a bow
from her shoe. Her younger sister, Peggy Schuyler, described by one of
the dinner guests as a "wild flirt," put the bow in the buttonhole of
Hamilton's coat.

"There brother, I have made you a knight," she said.

"But of what order?" Angelica asked. "He can't be a knight of the garter
in this country."

"True sister," replied Peggy Schuyler, "but he would be if you would let
him."

VII

Was Hamilton as financially pure as he claimed to be? The answer would
seem to be yes. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the wily thoroughly
corrupt politician who served a half dozen French regimes, became
a Hamilton admirer during the two years he spent in America to escape the
guillotines of France's revolutionary wild men. In later years Talleyrand
listed Hamilton with England's William Pitt and Napoléon Bonaparte as
the three greatest men he had met in his lifetime. If he had to choose between
the three, Talleyrand said he would have given Hamilton first place.

One night in 1795, Talleyrand passed Hamilton's law office on his way
to a party. He saw the former secretary of the treasury toiling over a brief
by candlelight. At the party, the astounded Frenchman told everyone that
he had just seen "a man who made the fortune of his country, but who is
working all night in order to support his family." In France or England, a
grateful government would have permitted a politician who handled millions
in public funds with Hamilton's genius to get rich.

An examination of Hamilton's account books reveals that he earned his
$11,000 a year the hard way, handling scores of cases for mostly modest
fees. Robert Troup often reproached Hamilton for his low fees, warning
him that his friends would have to bury him at their expense. At one
point, Troup got his own annual income up to $11,500 by working from
dawn to midnight, seven days a week. The toll on the overweight attorney's
health was horrendous. By 1804 he was suffering from recurrent
asthma attacks and heart palpitations.

In 1796, one of the big land speculators of the era, New York merchant
James Greenleaf, asked Hamilton to help extricate him from a tangle of
debt amounting to $1.2 million that he had accrued while buying some
$5 million in land and stock. If Hamilton rescued him, his fee would be a
third of Greenleaf's net worth. It was a chance to make perhaps a million
dollars, but Hamilton turned him down. He feared Greenleaf was trying
to trade on his influence as ex-secretary of the treasury.

Around the same time, Robert Troup, already weary of the legal grind,
tried to inveigle Hamilton into joining him and another champion land
speculator, ex-British army Captain Charles Williamson, in buying millions
of acres of upstate New York for English investors. Williamson had
become an American citizen, a legal fiction that would enable them to
evade the state law against foreigners buying land. Hamilton and Troup
would draw up covert agreements that would protect the English
investors against fraud. Their reward would be a handsome slice of the
action.

Troup offered to keep Hamilton's name secret, swearing on his honor
that he would never reveal it. Hamilton turned down this deal too, because
he was acutely sensitive to accusations by his political enemies that
he was pro-British. "There must be some public fools who sacrifice private
to public interest," Hamilton told Troup. It was his way of keeping himself
"in a situation the best calculated to render service."

VIII

Render service. By that phrase Hamilton meant public service. Underlying
this seemingly mundane term was a far more powerful word that explained
much of Hamilton's life: fame. This was the invisible mistress that
he had pursued for two decades, repeatedly sacrificing the happiness offered
to him by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton's bosom. In a letter to a
Scottish uncle, written not long before he published the confession of his
affair with Maria Reynolds, Hamilton discussed the "love of fame" as a
"passion" that was the "spring of action." The pistol metaphor adds a
heavy irony to these words.

In the era of the American Revolution, fame had a very special meaning,
which had little to do with being famous in the current celebrity
sense of the word. For Hamilton and the other founders, fame was inextricably
linked with honor and a special kind of achievement. Sir Francis
Bacon, the English philosopher and organizer of knowledge, had popularized
the concept. Bacon dismissed the praise of the common people as
irrelevant to seekers after true fame. They had "no sense at all" of the
higher virtues. Winning fame, Bacon maintained, meant winning the
praise of persons of judgment and quality.

In Bacon's Essays, a book which the young Hamilton studied assiduously
(as did Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Aaron Burr, and many others),
there is a five-stage classification of fame. On the bottom rung were
fathers of the country, who "reign justly and make the times good wherein
they live." Next came champions of empire, leaders who enlarge their
country through conquest or defend her against invaders. Next came saviors
of empire, who deliver their country from the miseries of tyrants or
the chaos of civil wars. Next came the great lawgivers, such as Solon, Lycurgus,
Justinian. Finally, at the summit, were founders of empires, such
as Cyrus of Persia and Julius Caesar of Rome. These stellar heroes were
both great generals and wise legislators.

This passion for fame had deep roots in Hamilton's life. In 1778, as
America's revolutionary fervor ebbed, he wrote a pamphlet attacking congressmen
who were using their political power to get rich while the Continental
army starved. Hamilton expressed amazement that a man could do
such a thing, when he had a chance to be "THE FOUNDER OF AN
EMPIRE." [These are Hamilton's capitals.] Such a man had an opportunity
to "do good to all mankind." From such a "commanding eminence" he
should look down "with contempt on every mean or interested pursuit."

The imperatives of fame underlay Hamilton's decision to confess his
sexual adventure with Maria Reynolds to prove his political and financial
integrity. He was ready to sacrifice his marital happiness to keep his
honorand his eligibility as a candidate for fameinviolate. Fame also
explains why Hamilton's legal fees were notoriously low and he was still
in debt. Making a lot of money was "a mean and interested pursuit"unworthy
of a pursuer of fame.

Hamilton's passion for fame was complicated by his rediscovery of his religious
feelings. Christianity preached meekness, humility, almost a contempt
for reputation, power, founding empires, and the other glories of this world.
By 1804, General Hamilton was carrying more psychological baggage than
even the most gifted man could handle without spiritual confusion.

IX

In another revealing comment in his letter to Robert Troup, rejecting a
chance to make big money with Charles Williamson, Hamilton told his
old friend they were playing a great game for the highest stakes: "nothing
less than true liberty, property, order, religion and of course heads." The
bloody excesses of the French Revolution had entwined death and politics
to an unparalleled degree in many minds. The pugnacious Hamilton often
demonstrated his readiness to put his life on the line in the swirling
controversies that the French upheaval ignited in America, especially after
war exploded between England and France in 1793.

In 1795, angry Republican mobs took to the streets protesting John Jay's
commercial treaty with England, which defused a potential clash with the
former mother country over their wholesale seizures of American ships
trading with the French. Jay persuaded the British to pay for the seizures
and also won most-favored-nation status for American ships carrying imports
to Englandan exemption that meant millions in profit for American
merchants. But the Jeffersonian Republicans saw the agreement as a
corrupt compromise that betrayed France, whose money and soldiers had
supported America in her revolutionary struggle against England.

In New York, Hamilton defended Jay's treaty vigorously in the newspapers
and met the protestors face to face in the streets. The mob was led by
prominent Republicans such as Commodore James Nicholson, a veteran
of the Revolutionary navy. A shouting match ensued in which Hamilton
offered to fight "the whole Detestable faction" one by one. He emerged
from the confrontation with two proffered duels, one with Nicholson and
another with a member of the Livingston clan. Cooler heads intervened
and both challenges were resolved short of gunfire.

In the course of the Reynolds imbroglio, Hamilton came even closer to
fighting a duel with ex-Senator James Monroe, who admitted he had kept
copies of the incriminating letters and documents. Monroe had left the
copies with one of Jefferson's most devoted followers, John Beckley, former
clerk of the House of Representatives, who leaked them to James Thomson
Callender. An infuriated Hamilton called Monroe a liar to his face when he
denied any role in the revelations. This confrontation was followed by a
stream of menacing letters from both men. Only the good offices of Aaron
Burr, who served as Monroe's second in the affair, prevented immediate
gunfire. Having read all the pertinent letters and documents, Burr said he
was sure Monroe believed "as I do ... that H. is innocent of the charge of
any concern in speculation with Reynolds" and recommended saying so in a
joint statement as "an act of magnanimity and justice."

Monroe declined to make this gesture but Hamilton decided the confessional
pamphlet was a better way to defend his honor. There was little
visible evidence that it accomplished this goal. He was mocked unmercifully
in the Republicans' newspapers for making his home "the rendezvous
of whoredom." The former secretary of the treasury was told that
he could claim no merit, except a dubious virility. In a letter to his mentor
and hero, Thomas Jefferson, Callender gloated that Hamilton had done
himself more damage than "fifty of the best pens in America could have
said against him." Jefferson snidely commented that pleading guilty to
one crime was not exactly de facto exoneration for another crime. Jefferson's
closest friend, James Madison, called it "a curious specimen of the
ingenious folly of its author."

Most Federalists assumed the Reynolds' pamphlet finished Hamilton
as a candidate for president or any other public office. But Judge
David Cobb of Massachusetts took a more realistic eighteenth-century
view: "Hamilton is fallen for the present," he told ex-Secretary of
War Henry Knox. "But if he fornicates with every woman in the cities
of New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again." The American
public, Cobb maintained, did not expect "purity of character" in their
politicians.